Removing encryption is the final nail in device ownership, and probably the idea of a democratic society.
But boy do I like privacy / hope it sticks around.
The first private conversation that Martin Luther King, Jr. had about the injustice of his time was captured and automatically analyzed, and as a result he was identified as a disturber of the peace and arrested for unrelated violations long before his message ever reached an audience.
Rosa Parks was detained for disorderly conduct long before she made her stand, and as a result her stand never happened.
There was never a zeitgeist of change in the oppressed community, because there were never any stories of people resisting. They were all prevented from acting in any significant way, or from getting together to share their stories and find support.
The issue of racial discrimination never made it to court because all of the people who could have brought it there were stopped before they could get started.
Perfect surveillance can stop any threat to the status quo while it's in its infancy, long before it amounts to anything. It can probably do it without introducing any new, draconian laws by simply looking through recent history for "questionable" actions and harassing people over them.
The argument that it's okay now basically amounts to saying that there is no longer any injustice and that today's system is a perfect example of virtue and fair play, and that anyone who disagrees is a malcontent who really does deserve to be silenced.
Sometimes the majority is wrong, and it takes brave people willing to break the rules in order to point it out and change things. I'd say that democracy does depend on privacy for this reason.
I'd argue with little to no privacy the government actually has less power in situations like this. Because the lack of privacy extends to what the government is doing also. Cameras/microphones/eyes everywhere means it's much more difficult to get away with a lot of the covert insanity that was happening before.
I would say things like Snowden/Panama Papers/Wiki leaks/many other examples are showing that having privacy can actually benefit the people in power more than the average Joe. Joe Blow doesn't want his dildo collection known about, the government doesn't want (insert insane things like funding drug cartels/terrorist organizations) to be known. All in all I'd say sacrifice knowledge your dildo collection for the greater good.
That said I do believe privacy still needs to be a thing. I hope it is a thing again in the future. But I actually don't know how horrible it is that it's gone away. People might just have to tell the truth for a while, which might benefit society in its current corrupt state?
Yes, it absolutely does. The most effective way to fight a political ideology is not meeting it fairly on the marketplace of ideas to fight it directly. If the opponent is allowed to an opportunity to fight, you might lose. To guarantee a win, you have to stop the opposing political ideas before the organize into an ideology that people can support and fight for.
Political movements need time to mature. It's easy to disrupt proto-ideologies if you can identify the people that might bring together separate parts of the social graph before they knit together into a self-sustaining political movement. This is what the FBI did to disrupt civil rights groups under COINTELPRO[1]. This is what GCHQ's JTRIG[2] group is probably doing today.
While the Freedom of Assembly doesn't get as much discussion compared to speech/religion/etc, it's one of the most important rights. Assembling with people in public is how an idea moves into public view. Ideas you only discussed cautiously in private ("in the closet"?) are a lot easier to discuss openly in public when you realize other people have the same beliefs.